


Hanged Man

by Corvid_Knight



Category: Homestuck
Genre: my tumblr is knight-of-heart-and-art, poetry as prose, tarot symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 00:01:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14580549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/pseuds/Corvid_Knight
Summary: Inspired by the fact I looked up the meaning of the tarot card The Hanged Man and literally started crying over how well it for Dave's character arc.





	Hanged Man

_Sacrificing. Martyrdom. Putting others first._

You've died a thousand times. 

It's a fucking fact of life now, that sometimes you wake up gasping and clutching at your chest, clawing at your throat, whimpering and curling up into a tighter ball. It's not cool, but there's not really anything you can do about it. You can't cut yourself off from yourself, after all, can't separate one Dave from the limitless multitudes that exist in all the infinite timelines.

No one's supposed to know. 

Karkat knows.

Karkat worries, when you wake him up screaming about white and black swords, screaming for him, for Jade, for people you haven't even met yet. You tell him it's bad dreams, old memories, flashbacks to times you had to fight. You don't know how to tell him that in some universes, you _still_ fight, you _always_ fight. That you feel yourself die. 

You hope he never finds out about the times when you walk into a room and see yourself standing there already, bloodied, shoulders slumped, shades cracked and shattered sword in hand. He doesn't need to know that timelines are still failing, that you're still capable of turning back the clock, dooming and resetting in the space between seconds. 

No one needs to know. 

You're the Knight of Time, and this is on your shoulders.

* * *

_Accepting what is. Surrendering. Feeling outside of time._

You don't want to. 

This is your job. You're the only one who can do it. You're the Knight of Time, the one who flips the rhythm and breaks the clocks, puts them back together and cheats death. 

(Well. You don't cheat him. There's a forfeit you pay, and _that_ you can't escape.) 

But you weaponize minutes, forge seconds into daggers and gut each universe-ending event, kill yourself and wake up knowing what you did. You have to. You don't want to do this anymore (did you ever?) but you _have_ to. 

Even if it means you wake up and wonder what timeline you're in now. Even if you can never tell if the words you soon out to the others are something you've said a thousand times before, or if they're hearing it for the very first time. 

You can't keep doing this. 

You have to keep doing this. 

You _will_ keep doing this, for as long as it takes.

* * *

_Seeing from a new angle. Having an emotional release. Being vulnerable and open. Taking time just to be._

Karkat's the one who teaches you how to let go of the anxiety and the Time shit, and you don't think he even knows he's doing it. He thinks you're part of his job (and why? Even if he helped create your universe, you're not his responsibility) and part of that is, apparently, annoying the shit out of you. 

Not that you let him know he's doing that. No, you annoy him right back. But he doesn't pretend you don't get to him, which is...

Wrong? 

No. 

_Right._

You like seeing how he reacts to you. You fucking _love_ cataloguing all his emotions that you can provoke—at first it's just anger, irritation, ire of all possible descriptions. Then, slowly, over the three years you have with him in the silence of space (broken only by the two of you and the few others on the meteor) you find other emotions. 

Amusement. Happiness. Affection. And at some point you look up at him and pull away in fear and shock, because you see something you don't expect from another guy. 

You see _love_ , and you run from it. 

It takes weeks and so fucking many talks with Rose for you to be able to go back to him, to really look at him again, to curl up in a pile of blankets and try to talk things out.

But you do. 

And you tell him that he's not the only one who's fallen for someone unexpected. Karkat lets you cling to him as you try to handle the feeling of caring this much about somebody, shooshes you and paps your hair gently and doesn't ask about the wet patch you're making on his sweater. 

He's strong enough to snap your neck like a twig. The position you're in shouldn't be safe. 

But it is.

* * *

_Turning the world around. Upending the old order. Waiting for the best opportunity. Ending the struggle. Overturning old priorities._

The end isn't what you expect. 

You guess that that's because technically, it isn't the end. 

You stand with your sword drawn and your bro beside you, but not in a way you ever have before. He's no older than you, in this reality, both softer and harder than the brother who raised you. It's him, and it's not him, and you know you'd die for this one in a heartbeat, and you know that he knows that and would never let you. 

He's the one who falls, though. You guess you should have seen that coming, with all your foreknowledge. But when he's pinned down, the look he gives you is as painfully unexpected as it is clear. 

Heads fall, separated from the bodies they belong to. 

You catch his body before it hits the ground, and some version of you from minutes in the future flashes into existence and catches his head, and before the other corpse falls you're both gone. 

And Dirk is only dead for a minute. 

Because this time, you save him. 

And like your brother, the universe dies only to live again.

* * *

_Giving up urgency. Living in the moment._

Learning to stop _expecting_ is hard. There's no more threats, nothing to cringe from when you open doors. The dreams are just dreams again, for the first time in years. 

They have to teach you that. 

It takes time, and sometimes you wonder if that's irony. Real irony, not your version of it. That it takes you this much time to recover from all the time you lived through, everything you've done and had done to you. 

Sometimes you wonder if there's a faster way, better for everyone else. 

Karkat knows when you start wondering. He says he can see you watching the clocks, and he'll stop every one he can find, just so you'll relax and stay with him. He knows you'll always come back, but he worries about where your mind goes when you sit and watch the seconds bleed away.

You can't tell him what you remember when your mind goes away, and he doesn't force you to. 

You're always thankful when he stops the clocks and pulls you to lie down with him. There's nothing you want more than to be in this place, in this time, with the one you love. Knowing that even if time is passing, it's not your job to keep track of it. 

You're Dave Strider, Knight of Time, and here on Earth C you can ( _finally_ ) lay down your sword.


End file.
